Posts Tagged «siggraph»

At its Siggraph 2014 booth, Intel is showing off one of the first public demos of DirectX 12 and Direct3D 12 — and the improvement over older graphics APIs, such as DirectX 11, is really quite startling. The exact same demo under DirectX 12 consumed 50% less power than the DirectX 11 version. In a similar demo, the higher efficiency and lower overheads of DX12 allowed for a 60% increase in frame rate over DX11 while consuming the same amount of power. After an awful lot of talk about the benefits of Mantle, DirectX 12, and OpenGL NG, it’s very exciting to see an example of the actual real-world gains of these new graphics APIs.

At Siggraph 2014, the Khronos Group has announced both OpenGL 4.5 and, more excitingly, the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative. OpenGL 4.5, except for some new Direct3D 11 emulation features for easier porting, is your fairly standard annual OpenGL update. Next Generation OpenGL (OpenGL NG), however, is a complete rebuild of the OpenGL API. The idea, much like AMD’s Mantle and DirectX 12, is to build an entirely new version of OpenGL that removes a lot of the abstraction, significantly reducing the overhead and inefficiencies when working at a low level with the bare metal GPU hardware.

At Siggraph 2014, Microsoft Research has unveiled Hyperlapse, an ingenious algorithm that will actually make you want to watch first-person GoPro footage. Hyperlapse scans through hours of video footage, reconstructs the physical path that you took in 3D, and then generates a super-smooth 10x-speed hyperlapse video that is immensely watchable (it’s a lot like a video game, in fact). Really, watch the videos below – I guarantee they’ll be the coolest thing you see today.

Siggraph 2014, probably the world’s most prestigious computer graphics (CG) convention, is almost upon us — and once again, it’s time to feast our eyes on the various next-gen CG technologies and techniques that are coming down the pipe. As always, Disney Research will be one of the most active participants, presenting a bunch of papers detailing myriad innovative ways of tearing, animating, and melting cute animals, but Microsoft Research and most of the world’s top universities will also be present to demonstrate their latest CG findings.

Along with mouths and hair, eyes are one of the biggest reasons why artificial creations can’t climb their way out of the uncanny valley. One reason for this is because artificial eyes — in computer-generated models or on animatronic robots — are simply not expressive enough. Disney Research has taken a step toward correcting this issue by creating 3D-printed eyes that are not only extremely expressive, but dynamic.

Nvidia has taken the wraps off the Logan (Tegra 5) SoC. Nvidia isn’t talking about the CPU yet (it’s probably Cortex-A15, like Tegra 4), but the GPU… oh the GPU is a mobile version of Kepler that blows every other mobile graphics solution out of the water. Mobile Kepler can match the performance of the iPad 4’s GPU while consuming one-third of the power. Perhaps more importantly, though, mobile Kepler finally brings feature/API parity to PCs, next-gen consoles, and smartphones.

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